Thursday, March 18, 2010

This is after another round of crits. The place these guys occupy in space needed a bit of character too, so I worked on the area they're running around in. I pushed the industrial motifs. The red dot gives them a more definitive "bad" feeling and with a tip of the hat to Hal 9000. After I finish this I would like to do a portrait of a thought policeman without the helmet.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

I posted a work-in-progress for this piece and received some valuable feedback from people I showed it to. With fresh eyes, they confirmed my sneaking suspicions that it was a stinker! The piece started out as a character design and merged into and "almost illustration". It was stuck in purgatory between the two, and had none of the good qualities of either. Starting again was the best idea.

Now I'm shooting more for an illustration, and I'm trying to regain some of the menace that my previous piece was missing. This is only a sketch, so I still have a long way to go before this would be considered done. I may try some other comps to get a different camera angle.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

After the last piece, I got to thinking...the most interesting looking characters of 1984 were really the thought police, at least in my mind. The ruthless enforcers of the INGSOC regime seem to pop up everywhere in one form or another, even outside the novel. Some of my favorite examples are in Terry Gilliam's Brazil with creepy baby-faces and Lucas' THX 1138 with its mask-faced leather clad robot cops.

These are some of the quick sketches I did based on the general feeling from the previous painting. I got off the rails in a few areas, but it's good to push past the boundaries of what works for the source material to see what the limits are. I'm not 100% on any of these but I have a few that I like, and after gathering some reference, I think I'll do a full blown character design. THEN, on to the Spring piece. I actually have stuff to post for that too, but I'm on a 1984 kick, and I might as well ride it out while it's here.